As every poster for The Winter’s Tale irresistibly quotes, “A sad tale’s best for winter”— and that is the dominant impression of this play, which is seeped in melancholy and whose celebrations are still underlined by loss. Camillo, a strange character whose role is much larger than his reputation, is a servant caught up in the strife between the unravelling King Leontes and his former best friend King Polixenes, who Leontes suspects of sleeping with Hermione, Leontes’ wife.
“I have trusted thee, Camillo / With all the nearest things to my heart”
On some level, The Winter’s Tale is a play about people who don’t understand each other. If even just one or two characters were better at interpreting the unspoken motivations behind others’ actions, or at conveying the reasons for their own behavior, the play almost certainly wouldn’t happen.
Camillo is King Leontes’ servant and confidante, and serves as visiting King Polixenes’ cupbearer, a role with suitably mythological associations for a play that is set in Sicily and Bohemia but also, at one point, calls upon the Oracle at Delphos for a crucial plot point. He is the person who stands at the king’s side, who quite literally potentially holds the king’s life in his hands. And vice versa: Leontes pointedly notes that Camillo is one “whom I from meaner form / Have benched and reared to worship.” And Camillo is deeply aware in a way that more high-status characters repeatedly fail to grasp that nothing can stop the whims of an angry king.
After plunging himself into a frenzy of irrational jealousy over the course of a single scene, King Leontes corners Camillo with a command to poison King Polixenes. Camillo, though initially forcefully refusing to entertain Leontes’ suspicions, agrees with a caveat: “I [...] will fetch off Bohemia for ’t— / Provided that, when he’s removed, your Highness / Will take again your queen as yours at first.”
Leontes agrees—that’s the plan, he promises— and departs. Camillo immediately turns to the audience to explain that he absolutely will not be doing what he just promised to. In this play about misunderstood motivations, Camillo is startlingly clear-eyed: here and throughout, he understands at once the rational course of irrational actions—what will happen to him if he makes various choices, and what he needs to do to keep himself safe. While others waste time attempting to reason or puzzle out what Leontes is thinking and why, Camillo knows that working out the why won’t prevent him from getting killed. For Camillo is startlingly, nakedly self-interested. No one in the play changes masters more than he, but because his continual allegiance-switching works out to the benefit of his superiors, he is rewarded in the end for his apparent devotion.
The very first thing Camillo does after Leontes leaves is spill the beans to Polixenes and pledge himself to the Bohemian king, with whom he secretly flees the country. In doing so, he saves both of their lives, but perhaps condemns Hermione, as Leontes takes this sudden flight as confirmation of Polixenes’ (and thus Hermione’s) guilt.
Camillo passes the play’s sixteen-year interval serving Polixenes in Bohemia. While we began the first half of the play with Camillo and another minor courtier discussing matters in Sicilia, we behind the second with Camillo again, this time seeking permission to return home and see Leontes, which Polixenes brusquely denies. Before long, however, an opportunity presents itself. Once again, Camillo secures passage to where he wants to be through minor betrayals, manipulating and undermining the whims of temperamental kings. This time, he promises Polixenes’ son he’ll help him flee Bohemia to elope with Perdita, the apparent shepherdess he wants to marry, and then (once again) instantly turns around and tells Polixenes so that he and the irrationally stubborn Polixenes will have to pursue them to—where else would Camillo send them?—Sicilia.
“If you may please to think I love the King…”
This is not how servants in Shakespeare tend to act. They tend to be unflaggingly loyal and devoted, undertaking journeys, hijinks, even violence on their masters’ behalf. The exceptions are when masters are transparently undeserving, like Falstaff in The Merry Wives of Windsor, or of course in tragedies, where the two-faced deception of someone like Iago is part of the shock. But Camillo is not only never punished for continually lying, no one ever seems to notice. He isn’t framed as a comic, clever servant getting one over on master after master, no one but the audience aware that he’s out for himself, because he isn’t ever particularly funny. There are rogues who seek the audience’s alliance in this way in The Winter’s Tale, but Camillo isn’t quite like them.
I think it is very important that Camillo is apparently not a gentleman by birth—as Polixenes, in a typically bizarre bit of phrasing, says, “you are certainly a gentleman, thereto / Clerklike experienced, which no less adorns / Our gentry than our parents’ noble names.” This seems to match Leontes’ comment shortly before this line, that he is the one who raised Camillo “from meaner form” to his current status. Camillo is a clerk, a servant—not a courtier. This is presumably why his machinations go unnoticed, why characters (and, I think, a lot of audiences) are happy to assume that he is of course filling the conventional role of devoted servant, and requires no further scrutiny. (We might think back to Horatio, a similarly blurrily-classed figure of service and devotion.)
When Prince Florizel realizes that Camillo and Polixenes have followed him to Sicilia, he’s incredulous: “Camillo has betrayed me, / Whose honor and honesty til now / Endured all weathers.” But in separating out ‘honor’ and ‘honesty,’ we are forced to consider whether both are really true. Camillo has perhaps acted to maintain his honor—to refuse to kill a king, to refuse to remain a permanent exile when he did nothing wrong, even to refuse to help separate a young couple in love—but he can’t quite be credited with unwavering honesty.
Neither Florizel nor anyone else follows up on this accusation. Camillo’s lies are apparently too narratively essential to condemn. He saves Polixenes (and even if he does condemn Hermione in the process, she turns out to be fine anyway), he reunites Leontes with his lost daughter by inadvertently directing her to flee to Sicilia, he brings about the reconciliation of the two Kings by forcing Polixenes to follow his wayward son.
And his reward is to be abruptly, bizarrely married—to Hermione’s gentlewoman Emilia, his counterpart as voice of reason and fellow worker of deceitful plot miracles. Unlike Camillo, she fights rather than flees; she performs unexplained wonders rather than laying out her schemes to the audience.
Camillo can always explain himself, even if he generally only offers the full truth to the audience; Emilia explains others to themselves, even when they’re unwilling or unable to listen. Hurriedly conducted in the play’s final speech, with no opportunity given for reply by either prospective bride or groom, their betrothal is explicitly framed as a reward for both of them. Having saved their royal masters, they deserve each other. Like the wife that Emilia miraculously returns to Leontes, the husband Leontes offers to Emilia vanished for sixteen years and could only return once Leontes’ lost daughter was found. Camillo has been elevated socially because two kings found him trustworthy, and this marriage at last confirms his status. His services as scheming clerk are no longer required.
Camillo and Emilia are also the people who pull the strings of theatre to make happy endings for the rich and foolish. While Emilia marshals forces of (perhaps?) actual magic that can only really exist onstage, Camillo’s theatrical workings are more mundane: the ability to turn aside, to explain, to reassure the audience that someone has everything in hand, someone is tying together the strings that only they can see. Even if you do not notice, there is a hand at work pushing the currents of fate in the right direction for the happy ending.
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